Blog for the RepRap project at www.reprap.org - a project to create an open-source self-copying 3D printer. To get all the early posts on this blog with all the images as a single PDF visit this page.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Ponoko Lasercut RepRap BoM

Russ Nelson has kindly compiled a Bill of Materials for the Ponoko lasercut RepRap. He did this with a markup language that is integrated into the web pages themselves, allowing him to pull the BoM out automatically for any web page using the same markup scheme.

For example, two M5 washers would be described in the wiki page as:

<part p="two M5">washer</part>

I am also able to offer a 50% discount on Ponoko's cutting costs to RepRappers. They currently have the V1.1 design available here but it has the words "Safe area" printed over the parts and I can't change it because a run is in progress. However the source files are in my user RepRap directory on SourceForge, and I can cut unblemished ones.

Ralith is testing out the new 3.5mm ball-chain gears from V1.1 because the old design frankly didn't work. But the 3.3mm ones are just fine.

There is also a single RepRap extruder design available, containing just one extruder and a selection of gears for various motors.

If you want the discount, get hold of either suz or vik at the diamondage.co.nz e-mail address and we'll set it up for you.

Finally, there is a #reprap channel on freenode.net where a lot of real-time assistance can be had, and the RepRap Project has applied for stewardship of it. If you've not used IRC before, the best way is probably a Firefox browser add-on called Chatzilla.

I just want you guys to know how important and interesting I think this project is. Quick question though: If I build a Darwin, will I be able to have it print RepRap 2.0? Or should I just wait, because of the amount of electronics i would have to buy to upgrade

You should be able to do the upgrade one way or another, but the crucial changes may well not need much to change. For example, the right extruder and a firmware change would upgrade to printing with low-temp alloy.

Improvements aimed at reducing cost probably won't affect performance, so you can skip those if you want to be an early adopter.

The electronics is *always* in flux. But it is nice and modular. It is hard to see the intrinsic behaviour of things like stepper drivers and PWM driver boards change.

The safest bet would be to go for a Sanguino instead of the Ardiuno, simply because it has more RAM & ROM and will last longer on the firmware front. We are working on a motherboard, but the current design has the Sanguino plugging straight into it.